Left Right and Centre

Nookin

I have been looking forward to Prime Rocks tonight –on Leonard Cohen. Sadly, I did not expect a bunch of no-names setting out to ruin his music. KD Lang can do it. Jeff Buckley did ok but with these few exceptions, only Leonard Cohen can sing Leonard Cohen.

Left Right and Centre

Going home is easier with the usual bunch of morons on their phones, on their phones and still more on their fing phones; signalling still optional, lane changing exciting, all the usual blah blah blah of commuting. Did I mention the use of phones, calling, speaking and texting?

This comment reminds me of when I drove buses – the motorway commute leading up to xmas . . .
Starting with those at the top – each week the next social class down would become absent until . . .
Just the dribbling peons such as moi remained to roam an empty four lane.

Manolo

The State Department paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayers grants to an Israeli group that used the money to build a campaign to oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in last year’s Israeli parliamentary elections, a congressional investigation concluded Tuesday.

Manolo

Lawyers for Hillary Clinton are going to federal court for the first time to block efforts to force her to testify in a civil lawsuit related to her private email set-up.

Clinton’s attorneys submitted a legal filing Tuesday morning in a bid to shut down a conservative group’s request for an order forcing her to submit to a deposition in the midst of her presidential campaign.

Manolo

ISIS is celebrating the end to a particularly bloody month of attacks.

On Tuesday the jihadi group’s weekly magazine al-Naba boasted that 5,200 people were killed or wounded in “military operations” during the holy month of Ramadan, including the deadly attack in Orlando last month.

Manolo, I notice that the whitehouse.gov site has a petition there re: Clinton, and it has over the necessary 100,000 votes, which means it must be addressed by the White House (not that they will probably do anything about it). In fact, over 232,000 people have signed it.

Secretary of State Clinton was in direct violation of the agreement between her and the United States of American outlined on the Standard Form 312, section 4. She sent classified information outside of a server with the classification needed to keep the information she was sending secure. Her actions have created a major security violation and could potentially be used by enemies of the state. This petition is being used to reverse the FBI decision and have HRC charged with all of the aforementioned charges, along with any others that are outlined in the SF 312.

“The State Department paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayers grants to an Israeli group that used the money to build a campaign to oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in last year’s Israeli parliamentary elections, a congressional investigation concluded Tuesday.

Some $350,000 was sent to OneVoice, ostensibly to support the group’s efforts to back Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement negotiations. But OneVoice used the money to build a voter database, train activists and hire a political consulting firm with ties to President Obama’s campaign — all of which set the stage for an anti-Netanyahu campaign, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations said in a bipartisan staff report.

In one stunning finding, the subcommittee said OneVoice even told the State Department’s top diplomat in Jerusalem of its plans in an email, but the official, Consul General Michael Ratney, claims never to have seen them.

He said he regularly deleted emails with large attachments — a striking violation of open-records laws for a department already reeling from former Secretary Hillary Clinton’s handling of official government records.”

mikenmild

Howdy godnutters

The Internet is killing religion—starting with the Mormon Church. The others will follow in course.
The reason’s plain. Religions that insist on “right belief” rely on a closed information system. The power structure must have some level of control over the information the faithful receive. The Internet has broken that closed information system. So religion will be done in by its Enemy of Old. No, not Satan. Knowledge. (For all I know, Satan’s religious.) The church has always resisted the advance of knowledge. Consider Copernicus. This time, though, knowledge really has religion on the ropes, and I don’t think it’s going to survive. What will take its place?

He considers, the Mormons, as they offer a classic example of religious fraud:

Before the Internet, when some Mormon leader would tell the faithful, in effect, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain,” it was all too easy for the faithful to shrug their shoulders and go on with their daily lives. To fact-check the preacher, one would have to find the car keys, get in the car, drive to the library, find the right microfiche—oh, hell, let’s just stay home and watch Father Knows Best. Now, though, everyone in America has the Internet in their homes, and they can easily research religious claims. Consequently, the Mormon Church is hemorrhaging members. (The church likes to claim it’s one of the world’s fastest-growing religions, thanks to those armies of well-scrubbed missionaries. That’s horseshit, as is their wont.)
Damn you to hell, Internet!

He goes on to clarify that the internet will kill religion, nut not necessarily belief in gods.

The Internet isn’t just about information. It’s about connections. We’ve found truth doesn’t come from On High. It comes from the network.
Churches are going to get out of the Telling You The Truth business. The transmogrified religions that survive the Internet age will be religions devoted to mystery, religions devoted to not knowing. We will see a flattening of traditional hierarchies, as it’s foolish to think anyone has a more direct line to God than anyone else. There will be more and more diversity, more and more openness, less credal exactitude. People’s religious affiliations will be more fluid.
This idea rankles orthodox folks. They think dogma is what is most important—because it was “revealed” by God. “Without correct doctrine,” they say, “you could just believe whatever you want.” Exactly. I mean, if God was so concerned we believe a certain set of facts about Himself, He could have been a hell of a lot plainer. But He wasn’t, so we’re left with mystery.
And really, it’s mystery that deserves worship, isn’t it? Something we have figured out . . . well, we have it figured out. Move on. But mystery . . . Mystery stirs us at our core. The new religion is coming. Get ready.

I don’t go along with that last bit. I have no doubt that the death of organised religion will see all manner of developments to satisfy psychological longings previously satisfied by religion.